Back in 2013, I wrote a little book whose purpose was to inspire my colleagues in sustainability. The book, complete with little stick-figure illustrations that I drew myself, was a surprise hit (in relative terms). It sold many thousands of copies, often in large group sales to whole companies or university programs. Sustainability is for Everyone became my second real bestseller.

Fast forward to late 2020. I have been working at Sida for several years now. It’s a wonderful, demanding position that leaves little time for side projects. But the Covid-19 pandemic means that I am not traveling and mostly working from home. That’s when I rediscover the Swedish translation, Hållbarhet är för alla.

The translation was almost complete when I started my current position (as Assistant Director-General in Sweden’s international development agency, leading a large department). I had left it sitting on ice. Turns out it just needed about one weekend of work to revive it, finish it, and publish it, through my own small imprint, Broken Bone Press.

So that’s what I did. And since Christmas was coming, and the pandemic was raging on, I decided to make the PDF version of the book free, as a gift to my adopted country. You can download it here. (Anyone can download it, but it helps to know Swedish if you want to read it. The English version is available through any online bookseller.)

Is the book still relevant, almost eight years later? Highly.

Of course the world has changed. I wrote a new preface in 2017, celebrating the arrival of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (the 17 SDGs). But the central idea is simple, and still necessary: for sustainability to truly succeed, we need as many people as possible to be engaged in making it happen.

Engagement requires communication. That’s what Sustainability is for Everyone (or Hållbarhet är för alla in Swedish, or Nachhaltigkeit ist für jeden in German, and soon La durabilité est l’affaire de tous in French) focuses on: how to communicate about sustainability, with people who may not even be interested.

That’s why this particular book treats this complex concept in such simple terms, with simple drawings: to create a sense of ease and even fun around the challenges of tackling global problems and finding systems-based solutions.

“If the world were a party,” I wrote in 2013, “sustainability would be the smart-but-nerdy cousin who somehow does not get invited — not because nobody likes her, but because everyone assumes that she will not fit in.” My aim was to help make sustainability “the life of the party. After all, without sustainability, the party could become a deadly nightmare.”

So, if you are Swedish, or have friends in Sweden, pass the word: Hållbarhet är för alla. The book is a free gift.

If you prefer English, visit this website. (A free version is available there, too.)

And stay tuned, the French version is on the way.